Kiss Goodbye to the Marketing Funnel

Marketers have always liked linear thinking — it’s wonderfully complicated and makes it easier to measure what’s going on. That’s why I have always liked the funnel thinking of the AIDA model — where you raise Awareness, turn it into Interest, change that to a Desire to buy, leading ultimately to Action, where a purchase is made. At each stage you could find metrics to see what influence you are having in driving a prospect down the funnel.

Steven Noble from Forrester Research says that’s all outdated thinking. It ignores the concept of loyalty and increasing the lifetime value of customers. Plus, in today’s multichannel environment, there are many more ways at which you interact with a customer or prospective customer.

Instead, in his recent paper “It’s Time to Bury the Marketing Funnel” he suggests an alternative — an ongoing cycle of discovering, exploring, buying and engaging. He talks through this model in this edition of BTalk.

It makes a lot of sense — maybe it is time to abandon some of our old textbook marketing techniques. They don’t apply today, and perhaps they weren’t too realistic then either!

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ABOUT PHIL

Phil Dobbie is a broadcaster and writer, with a wealth of business experience behind him too. He was a partner in an ad agency, he's been the marketing head at various technology companies and ran the Australian operation of the British Tourist Authority.

But his real love is the creation of content - as a journalist for ZDNet and others. He likes to spend time behind the microphone, creating radio shows and podcasts - he's done thousands of them, for CBS, National Australia Bank, BBC and CommsDay.

He's available to present radio shows and produce podcasts. Or any other exciting projects that come along.